With the Arizona Legislative Session over, citizen activists, stunned by the regressive taxation and voter suppressing measures passed over the last several months, are readying referendum petitions for Arizonans to sign that will appear on the 2022 ballot.
Organizations like Stand for Children, Arizona Deserves Better, and Invest in Arizona (which includes groups involved in the Invest in Education movement, the Children’s Action Alliance, the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, the Arizona Education Association, the Arizona Interfaith Network, and Save Our Schools Arizona) are working to undo:
- SB1485: The purge of the Permanent Early Voting List.
- The shift of election dispute power from the Secretary of State to the Attorney General.
- The prohibition of election officials from obtaining private grants to help run free and fair elections.
- The flat tax that gives the ultra-rich a $30,000 tax cut per individual while people at the bottom of the scale get only a three-dollar one. This is the same tax cut Republicans prioritized over a $12 million expansion of KidsCare for poor children or giving pregnant women access to dental care.
- SB1783: The measure that would take somewhere between $300 and $400 million from the voter-approved Proposition 208-Invest in Ed fund.
Commenting on the need to file these petitions, former Democratic Legislative Leader, Children’s Action Alliance head and leading organizer for Invest in Ed David Lujan commented to AZ Central that:
“That’s revenue that we think instead should be going to our public schools, going to help provide health care for children, affordable housing resources, all sorts of priorities that have been underfunded for years. Instead of investing in those things, they are attempting to give huge tax cuts to the rich, which is just disastrous for our future.”
There are only 90 days from when the legislative session ends and the Governor signs the bills to collect the signatures so time is of the essence.
Please listen for when these ballot petitions will be available to where to sign.
Please do your part in the fight to save Democracy and safeguard the will of the People in Arizona.
Sign these petitions in the next 90 days and vote in 2022 to undo the regressive taxation and voter suppression measures the members of the former party of Lincoln forced upon Arizonans in the waning days of the 2021 Legislative Session.
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The state legislators who passed these measures represent the actual will of the whole state, not just your liberal metros. This is why we have legislative districts. You have all these degrees, but it seems like all you’re doing with them is trying to subvert the expressed will of the people as represented by our duly-elected officials. The signature requirement for ballot measures should require those signatures to be obtained proportionally from every county in the state. In fact, maybe I’ll start a signature drive to add that as a ballot measure for 2022. I’ll call it the Balanced Ballot Signature Act.
Voters did not vote for their legislators to circumvent Prop 208. I am pretty sure they did not vote for their legislators to make voting more difficult. I am also fairly certain that if you asked voters, they would have preferred their legislator’s vote to spend $12 million to expand Kidscare for poor children rather than a billion-plus tax cut for the ultra-wealthy.